In the hearing aid industry a number of hearing aid manufacturers manufacture hearing aids. These hearing aids all differ in various ways. Modern hearing aids employ programmable technologies such as programmable digital signal processors. Manufacturers typically sell their hearing aids to vendors such as audiologists (sometimes termed “dispensers”) who, in turn, sell the hearing aids to end users (patients). Since one dispenser may need to be able to provide patients with the hearing aids of a number of different manufacturers, yet the dispenser may want to have a single computer dedicated to the effort of programming hearing aids, rather than one computer dedicated per vendor supported, a generic hearing aid interface (referred to as a “hearing aid programmer”) is commonly used to connect programmable hearing aids to the computer so that they may be programmed with parameters from the computer which are specifically matched to the hearing loss of the patient. The hearing aid programmer must be configured to provide the specific commands and the electrical interface required by the hearing aid(s) being programmed. The configuration process takes time and must provide the correct setup for the hearing aid(s) being programmed. When the hearing aid programmer is connected to the computer, the hearing aids(s) to be programmed may not be known and generally won't be connected to the hearing aid programmer until after the hearing aid programmer is connected to the computer. If the hearing aid programmer is configured at this time (power-up), the configuration may or may not be correct when actual hearing aids are connected and the fitting system software running on the computer is executed. It may be that the configuration will have to be cleared out and a new configuration entered into the hearing aid programmer. This can be wasteful and inefficient as the time taken to perform these processes is usually not insignificant.
Some hearing aid programmers are designed to trigger a configuration sequence when they are attached to the computer. This power-up sequence automatically loads firmware into the hearing aid programmer to configure it for communicating with particular hearing aids. Later, when the manufacturer-specific fitting system software is executed on the computer and generates the patient-specific parameters to be stored in the hearing aid, it may turn out that the hearing aid configuration in the hearing aid programmer is incorrect or incomplete for the specific hearing aid(s) to be programmed at that time.
What is needed is a solution which provides the ability to configure the hearing aid programmer's interface characteristics just prior to the time that the hearing aids are to be configured.